“Get ready for them – they are all beards and sandals – and that’s just the women!” was my dad’s perennial comment as our 1965 Morris Oxford turned up the drive of Mrs Hendy’s Vegetarian Guesthouse in Grasmere, the place we spent each summer holiday in the 1960s, along with the other assorted oddballs of the Vegetarian Society of England and Wales.
My family converted to vegetarianism in the 1860s, around the time that Darwin and others were popularising the notion, that had gained traction in the UK since the 1830s (The Vegetarian Society of England was formally established in 1847), that animals were sentient beings and thus capable of suffering. The family stopped eating meat for ethical reasons. The severe-looking gentleman in the centre of this article’s photo is my great grandfather, James Clephan. It was he who decided to stop eating animals and, Victorian patriarch that he was, made the whole family stop too.
Are you being served?
The habit passed down the generations. As children, not only was meat not served at home, we even had plastic shoes – which led to occasional playground ribbing. It was not always easy for my elder sister and me to be the sole vegetarians at a West Yorkshire comprehensive, but the dinner ladies catered for us well, we brushed off the occasional jibes and, in the end, our school friends didn’t care. They, like me, were more preoccupied with getting good marks in biology and picking up members of the opposite sex.
Taking the pulse
But isn’t vegetarian food boring? As a student, I vaguely remember a vegetarian recipe book titled Not Just A Load Of Old Lentils. Too right. Even back in the 1960s and 70s we ate excellent vegetarian dishes at home, including soya-based ‘meatless steaks’ and ‘sausalatas’ produced by a company called Granose: truly delicious. And we were all super healthy.
I have never bought the argument that eating red meat is vital for health. It is not. The World Health Organisation has produced a wealth of evidence about the health benefits of vegetarianism, as evidenced by the growing number of highly successful meat-free sportspeople. Enough said.
Shellfish are an abomination
The arguments for vegetarianism are stronger today than ever. Not least, the rights of sentient animals. In 50 years from now, I hope people will look back in horror at the industrial level, death camp-like extermination of some animals for food, just as we look back today at the horrors of slavery (abolition having a historical connection to the vegetarian movement) .
The philosopher Peter Singer, in his landmark book Animal Liberation, argues convincingly that on ethical grounds we should refrain from eating anything with a nervous system, that can therefore suffer. That means any animal beyond shellfish should not be eaten. The Book of Deuteronomy 14.10 got it spectacularly wrong!
Livestock’s long shadow
Now there is a newer set of arguments: food security and the environment. With a world population approaching 10 billion by 2060, with increasing climate pressure on land, and expanding urbanisation, we will need to produce more protein, more food overall, using ever more finite natural resources. We will have to prove Malthus was wrong.
Extensive livestock production is an inefficient use of land, even if pleasant on the eye, and a mainstay for some struggling rural communities (which is a serious consideration).
Producing a kilo of beef uses 13,000-15,000 litres of water. A kilo of wheat or soy uses one-tenth of that, rice one-fifth. A kilo of beef or lamb uses 50 times more land than cultivating a kilo of peas or tofu. And the energy efficiency of converting plant feed into red meat is very low.
Moving towards a more plant-based diet will free up massive tracts of land, as many scientific studies on the land use and water efficiency of different foodstuffs demonstrate, not least the seminal 2006 study setting out the environmental and climate footprint of livestock production.
Livestock production is also a major contributor to methane emissions and global warming. It has been said that if livestock were a country, it would account for as much emissions as the USA, China and India combined.
“It is meat and drink to me” – Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 5 scene 1
We should also resist the increasingly noisy disparaging of meat alternatives.
Farmers in Europe frequently protest about reductions in the hefty subsidies paid to them. They protest against increasingly onerous environmental standards to achieve net zero. They protest about nefarious foreign imports of beef and poultry which do not face the same production costs. To their litany of complaints is now added resistance to plant-based or lab-grown meat, seen as a threat to their livelihoods – as opposed to perfectly fair competition. To the point that, under the guise of consumer information, there are demands to proscribe producers from using the term ‘meat’ unless it describes food coming from the body of an animal.
This is to disregard history. The etymologists amongst us (confession: my first job on graduating was as an etymologist on the 1981 Longmans Dictionary) will advise that the word ‘meat’ did not originally refer to an animal product, but means simply food, as opposed to drink. Common sense tells us that there should be no ban on using the word meat, steak, sausages or the like, to describe plant-based food. The market – consumers – should decide.
So perhaps it’s high time to wear that beard or don those sandals again?
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